Response:Safe as Houses?
The Politics and Discourse of Feminism and Classics

Judith P. HallettUniversity of Maryland

The problems that I discern in the politics and discourse of feminism
and classics center on Homeland Security. Or at least on how secure,
how at home, feminism and we feminists actually are in the
discipline and profession of classics these days. Like several of
these papers, my reflections on our domestic and political wellbeing
as feminist classicists venture outside as well as inside our common
domain of classics: into our neighborhood and our premises.

Are feminists and feminism truly, and securely, at home in
classics? In advocating for more attention to women (and to other,
previously overlooked demographic entities), and in championing
gender along with race and class as key categories of informed
scholarly investigation and analysis, our colleagues in the field of
history think household as well as home, referring to their
discipline and profession metaphorically, as a mansion, a mansion
with many rooms. Now classics, too, may have qualified for
mansion-status back in the days when Wilamowitz, and Housman, and
Gildersleeve were, literally, household words. But the academic
marketplace has long since transformed us into a less desirable piece
of real estate.

Admittedly, no one would ever confuse our common domain with a sunny,
cozy little ranch house. Or with a hip, edgy, Upper West Side co-op.
Figuratively speaking, classics is more architecturally akin to a
suburban Colonial with a backyard deck, or to a Victorian with a
screened veranda. It’s multistoried (with its distinctive
hierarchies of institutions and research specialties). It’s
been stylishly extended on the exterior for easier communication with
neighbors and passers-by: through the proliferation of texts, and the
development of courses, in translation, as well as through
interdisciplinary undertakings and outreach endeavors. And over the
past thirty years, during my own academic lifetime, women, quite a
few of them feminists, have become increasingly visible in, and
responsible for the upkeep of, this modest, but by no means humble,
dwelling.

Female classicists are no longer restricted to the role-playing
options around “This Old Classics House” that greeted me
when I entered graduate school back in 1966: the professional
equivalents of a) marinating the red meat for our menfolk to barbecue
on the grill; b) soothing the egos of our gentlemen callers as they
lounged on the veranda; and c) inviting one another to spirited, but
socially disparaged, canasta and bridge parties. By which I mean a)
researching (and subsequently typing and editing) for our senior male
professors; b) earning substantially less while carrying a heavier
course load than our male colleagues at the reputedly second-rate
co-educational institutions willing to hire us; and c) for the lucky
few, reasonably remunerated employment at elite private women’s
colleges such as my own alma mater (where the students, though
capable and industrious, more often than not preferred male
professors).

Nowadays we can, and do, count on our upper digits the classics
programs here in North America that do NOT have full-time,
tenure-track, and for the most part tenured female faculty members.
Many women classicists, and feminist classicists of both genders,
hold positions at selective, formerly all-male and unabashedly male
supremacist institutions. Or at high-powered co-educational
institutions (such as my own) that once barred women from their
tenure-track ranks. Or even at top-flight research-oriented
departments that award the doctoral degree. We hold senior as well as
junior positions, and positions as chairs and deans and even college
presidents at these places. Women, several feminists among them, now
edit the majority of our U.S. classical journals. Women hold lofty
leadership positions in national, and regional, professional
organizations as well: in the American Philological Association
alone, most of the vice-presidents, the current president and the
president-elect are women.

But back to our household metaphor, and on to the discourse of
another, kindred discipline. More specifically, on to the words of
THE Lord, the late African-American literary scholar Audre Lorde,
about the master’s tools, and their inability to dismantle the
master’s house. And, a propos of these figurative household
tools, on to my own disquieting sense that the increasing visibility
and responsibility of women, and feminists, in the domain of classics
has not secured us an environment in which we are, truly, at home:
an expression which my American HeritageDictionary
defines as “comfortable and relaxed, feeling an easy competence
and familiarity.”

As it happens, we women and feminists in classics often employ
traditional master’s tools, when we entertain in, and
contribute to the maintenance of, our Classics domicile. No doubt
about it: if there were a Classics Home Depot, there would be a long
wait outside its ladies’ room. Unlike Lorde, I personally have
no desire to dismantle our professional and disciplinary dwelling,
merely to renovate it, to make it more livable and welcoming for us,
and for colleagues and students who have not always been made to feel
at home. I applaud the successful efforts by women in our
discipline and profession to make good use of those master’s
tools as they prove themselves the equals of male peers in publishing
and grantpersonship; in teaching large lecture courses to diverse
student populations and acculturating their own graduate students;
and in shouldering time-consuming administrative burdens on their
campuses, for journals and university presses, and within our learned
societies.

I am, however, far more impressed by the innovative strategies,
altogether different from those traditional master’s tools,
that we female and for the most part feminist classicists have
developed in refurbishing our residence of choice: our insistence on
gender-conscious and gender-inclusive research; on learner-centered
pedagogy; on mentoring graduate students and colleagues at
institutions other than our own; on accountability within the power
structures of departments, and publishing venues, and our
professional communities. Thus I ponder why our deployment of these
tools is not remodeling Classics more extensively, thereby rendering
it more livable and more welcoming. Why are we not yet more fully at
home?

Like Nancy Rabinowitz and Barbara Gold, I agree that we classicists
have moved on to “post-feminism without completing our tasks as
feminists or in feminist classical studies.” Consider, for
example, the field of Latin literary studies —in which Barbara
Gold and I and Amy Richlin and Marilyn Skinner have been publishing
feminist work since BEFORE the Reagan administration. Neither issues
of gender, nor an informed concern for the asymmetries and inequities
in either women’s fictive representations or women’s
historical lived realities, even figure in most of its current
scholarly discussions (even those in which less senior, though
purportedly feminist, women are asked to take part), The emphasis on
discourse, on fictive representation, to the neglect of lived reality
must bear some of the blame for this imperviousness to female
materiality, experience, and agency, for this indifference to women’s
modes of engagement and resistance, in both the texts we study and
ultimately in the professional community we inhabit. But even Nancy
Rabinowitz, who specializes in a field—Athenian tragedy—where
women’s representations and realities do receive close
scrutiny, even she voices discomfort with an intellectual and
professional environment that avoids taking ethically grounded
stands. Why, then, aren’t senior feminist women more effective
in shifting scholarly emphases away from ethically disengaged
discourse that erases material conditions? Why haven’t we been
able to do better at facilitating the wider deployment of these
non-traditional household tools?

One reason, I would contend, is that by taking on responsibility for,
and visibility within, our classics house, as administrators of
various kinds, many feminist classicists like myself have limited our
abilities to be advocates for change, the very kind of feminist
change that empowered us at earlier stages of our careers. For one
thing, the resulting diminution of our scholarly productivity has
cost us in professional credibility, at least relative to younger
(and usually male) colleagues with minimal, or no, administrative
experience. Their lesser accomplishments get excused on the grounds
of their scholarly promise and potential.

But advocacy is also by its very nature at odds with household
management, classics style. Department chairs and deans (and journal
editors, and APA officers) are not, of course, prohibited from taking
stands. First, though, they are expected to be fair in quotes and
nice in quotes to others in their management sphere (among them
others who are seldom fair or nice to anyone else). And I insert
these quotes because I am not certain that the displays of fairness
and kindness expected of us as administrators are either. Or that
they are compatible with challenging and changing the power
structures in which we chairs (and even deans) operate: structures
which require accommodating the needs and demands of students, and of
higher administrators, and especially of those who labor alongside us
in our own classics programs. For these structures, too, privilege
discourse (notions such as “faculty development” and
“career trajectories”) over materiality and agency, often
women’s materiality and agency. After all, they privilege those
who hold tenure-track, and especially tenured, positions over the
adjuncts, clerical staff and often graduate students who toil just as
long and just as hard, for less money and recognition and
controllable time. At least whenever I, in my capacity as chair, have
created allegedly more equitable teaching loads, or travel funding
procedures, or research leave policies for my (currently all-tenured)
full-time colleagues, I have invariably done so by placing greater
and unrecognized and invariably under-remunerated burdens on our
mostly female adjuncts and clerical staff as well as our graduate
students

For women, and feminists, to be more securely at home in
classics, to redesign our premises so that we feel at ease, and in
charge, and on top of things, we need to keep on deploying our new
household tools. But we also should strive towards making classics an
open house in the best sense of the word, more livable and welcoming
and just; more attentive and responsive to the differing experiences,
and material resources, of all its inhabitants.